“Charles! What the Devil— Here, Robley, take this horse back to her stable.” He dismounted, a look of wild dismay on his countenance. “She’s not badly hurt, I hope?”
Spence turned on the Beau his same expression of vague uncertainty.
“She’s dead!” Robley groaned. “The sweetest, most madcap minx what ever slipped her foot into a stirrup! Oh, my lady — I allus said as how your temper would plant you a facer one day, and now look! Dead, and how I am to meet the Earl —Look after her, Robley, he said afore we so much as left London—”
“Stable the horse,” Thrace muttered viciously to the groom; and with tears streaming down his crabbed cheeks, Robley complied. Charles Spence began to walk towards the terrace we had only lately quitted in such a spirit of enjoyment, but Lady Imogen was no feather weight in death, and his game leg was decidedly unsteady.
“Let me take her,” Thrace said, “lest you fall.”
“No!” Spence retorted savagely. “But for you—” Whatever reproach he might have uttered was allowed to die in silence. He trained his gaze on the house’s distant portal, and staggered forward; and so fixed was his purpose that it achieved a kind of sacred beauty. We all of us fell back from respect, and followed in the soldier’s train across the unmown lawns. He laid her in the saloon, on a gold and white sopha only lately refurbished; and knelt at its head with her limp hand in his, a courtier at the bier of a sleeping princess. Thrace stood like a stone near one of the long windows, his face turned to the lake’s prospect. The casement had been thrown open, and birdsong drifted on the air, impossibly sweet. Of all those assembled with heavy hearts in the silent room, Thrace must be the most severely tried by guilt and regret.
“Oh, God,” Spence muttered brokenly from his bowed position on the floor—“when I think of her father!”
Henry stepped forward — alone among the gentlemen still cool and collected. “I shall ride into Sherborne St. John and summon the surgeon.”
“His name is Althorp,” Thrace said over his shoulder. “I will accompany you, Austen.”
“Would that I could offer any assistance in such distress,”
John Middleton said heavily, “but I fear you have long been desiring our absence, Spence. We shall wait only for the doctor, and then depart for Chawton.”
The steward raised his head, as tho’ the words recalled him from a far country, and glanced towards the door. It had opened almost soundlessly on new-oiled hinges, and I saw that the groom, Robley, stood there. Beyond him in the main passage were assembled a hesitant group of domestics, their faces o’erspread with the most potent expressions of shock.
“Beggin’ yer pardon, sir.” Robley’s voice rang with a power quite alien to his earlier tone of sorrow. “I reckoned you ought to see this. ”
He held his right hand aloft.
Spence scowled and rose to his full height. “What is it, Robley?”
“A thorn,” the groom said, “near two inches long, and sharp as the dickens. I found it beneath the saddle when I put Nutmeg in her box. Cut the flesh so deep the mare was bleeding, she was.”
“What is that to me, at such a moment?” the steward cried.
“It ought to be everything, sir,” the groom retorted. “This here thorn’s the reason yon mare tossed her rider, and it was put there a-purpose. This thorn killed my lady Imogen.”
Chapter 19
A Bolt into the Blue
8 July 1809, cont.
There could be no talk of returning to Chawton now. Mr. Prowting stepped forward and grasped the great double doors, as tho’ desirous of shutting out the crowd of domestics assembled in the passage. “You must come in, sirrah, and explain yourself.”
The groom walked determinedly towards Charles Spence.
“You’re accustomed to cavalry, Major. You know what it should be like, with a great sharp thorn such as this beneath the saddle, as soon as her ladyship leaned into her race.”
Spence reached out as if in a dream, and grasped the thorn between his fingers.
“Pressing down on it she was, without even knowing, and the thorn stabbing Nutmeg all the while. It’s no wonder as the horse bolted and threw my lady; wanted to get the saddle off her back, she did.”
“But how—”
“That thorn weren’t there when I unsaddled the mare yestiddy,” Robley persisted obstinately: “The mare was clean. A thorn like that don’t just happen to find itself under a saddle. You take my meaning, sir?”
“You are saying that it must have been placed there,” Mr. Prowting declared, as Charles Spence remained silent. The steward was turning the thorn between his thumb and forefinger, fascinated, but at the magistrate’s words a terrible look of understanding burgeoned on his face.
“You saddled the mare, Robley.”
“But I did not fetch the saddle for the race. It was Mr. Thrace as did that,” the groom returned meaningfully. “Mr. Thrace, who allus rides out alone of a morning, and is in and out of the stable yard at all hours, and dislikes my lady with a passion to equal her own. Thought to put a noose around my neck, he did. Me, what has served her ladyship near twenty year!”
As we stood in horrified silence, aware of what the groom’s words must mean, Spence wheeled to stare at the Beau, who still stood by the great windows.
“Julian,” he whispered. “Can it be possible?”
Thrace did not reply. His handsome countenance had gone white — with fear or guilt, I know not — and all his easy manner was fled.
“Will you not speak, man? Defend yourself — explain yourself — but for God’s sake, speak!”
Thrace’s gaze moved from one of our faces to another. “I can no more say what has occurred than you, Charles.”
I believe Spence might have thrown himself at the man in fury then had my brother not stepped forward, quick as a flash, and restrained him. Catherine Prowting cried out as the two struggled; but Henry’s strength proved greater than Spence’s weak leg. The steward gasped, then sank to the floor near Lady Imogen’s still form.
“She was so joyous this morning — so proud of her home and her horse!” he muttered. “All of life, all happiness before her. A life snuffed out—”
It was then Julian Thrace made his mistake.
With a look of panic on his countenance, he dived without warning through the open window.
“Hi!” Henry shouted, and rushed to the casement. “He’s making for the stables! He shall bolt, and we do not take care!”
Robley turned with the swiftness of the monkey he so resembled and cried to Charles Spence, “Your gun, sir, if you take my meaning. I’ll fetch Rangle and the others and head ’im off at the gate!”
In an instant he was gone from the saloon.
Henry looked as tho’ he might follow Thrace through the open window, but John Middleton was before him.
“It is for the magistrate to act now, I think, Mr. Austen. Else we shall have a second murder done.”
Mr. Prowting was already standing before Charles Spence, his aspect the picture of painful dignity. “No gun, Major. No swift and untimely justice. The man shall be seized, and his guilt weighed in a court of Law.”
Spence turned his head towards the yawning casement, listening for a sound perhaps only he expected; and at that moment, I heard it too. The rapid patter of the great grey hunter’s hooves as they galloped, far beyond the reach of Robley and his baying pack, down the length of Stonings’ sweep.
• • •
“And so the gentlemen could not catch up with him,” my mother said that night, “tho’ they rode out directly in pursuit of the scoundrel?”
“Mr. Thrace’s horse was too swift,” Henry replied. “My hired hack was as nothing to his grey. Spence’s mount — an old cavalry charger — might have done the trick, but for the man’s delay in reaching the stables. Spence is a brave fellow, and I admire him exceedingly; but he could not at present be described as a great walker. I believe the Major would be as yet abroad in the countryside, combing hill and dale for Julian Thrace, had Mr. Prowting not recalled him to his duty.”